Another absolute gem: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-announcement
The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#22[flagged]
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Mossad/Not Mossad duality is a funny idea, but it isn't true. The NSA doesn't send replacement cellphones to millions of US citizens, they scrape unencrypted data. They're not going to use a quantum computer on you, if they have one. They're going to embed your emails into a vector space that they can project your sentiment out of.
I mean it's not literally mossad / not-mossad It's / Mossad is just a particular type of the first set
That's the false duality. NSA cannot "be stopped," but they don't use every tool they have available on every mission. When conducting foreign intelligence operations against high-value targets they will use 0days you can't secure against. When they're unconstitutionally surveiling you they'll use http and a large language model. Your inalienable rights are going to be violated by a deal with Google Cloud, not a quantum computer, or even a kernel bug.
In this context, the purpose of tools like "five way secret sharing" is to communicate in a way that can't be broken without revealing the existence of the 0days and exceptions to the judicial process by using them on a hundred million citizens at once. The threat model is a lot of very smart engineers who can passively listen to anything that gets sent over the internet, not Perry the Platypus.
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#24I'm horrible with names, so didn't recognize Mickens at first, but when I saw his picture on the paper I realized that I went through a binge of his public talks a few years back because he's such a great speaker. If you enjoy Bryan Cantrill giving talks, you'll like Mickens.
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#25> I need to prepare for the end times,
In the post apocalyptic world, what information do you take with you? A copy of wikipedia and a LLM? You get a laptop computer, maybe a 2023 macbook Pro m3, and find an array of solar panels. However, you lost your charger running from the radioactive zombies so you have to MacGyver it with 6 hours of charge left. What did you bring with you and how do you solve this?
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#26> One time I tried to create a list >, and my syntax errors caused the dead to walk among the living. yeah coffee is a heck of a drug ;-)
Older C++ compilers couldn't distinguish between a right-shift operator and the closing of multiple template parameter lists, but few people figured out you just had to put spaces between all those >s.
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#27> One time I tried to create a list >, and my syntax errors caused the dead to walk among the living. yeah coffee is a heck of a drug ;-)
Older C++ compilers couldn't distinguish between a right-shift operator and the closing of multiple template parameter lists, but few people figured out you just had to put spaces between all those >s.
The old C++ language specification said you needed a space. C++11 changed that, saying you don't need a space.
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Older C++ compilers couldn't distinguish between a right-shift operator and the closing of multiple template parameter lists, but few people figured out you just had to put spaces between all those >s.
The old C++ language specification said you needed a space. C++11 changed that, saying you don't need a space. https://stackoverflow.com/a/15785583
In 2005, I didn't know anyone who could afford a copy of the specification. My point was that many of the other C++ programmers I knew at the time assumed it wasn't possible to nestedly use type parameters, so they just avoided it. I'm sure there were probably a cryptic error message and several toxic message board communities involved, too.
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#29> One time I tried to create a list >, and my syntax errors caused the dead to walk among the living. yeah coffee is a heck of a drug ;-)
Older C++ compilers couldn't distinguish between a right-shift operator and the closing of multiple template parameter lists, but few people figured out you just had to put spaces between all those >s.
The problem is that map requires two template parameters and not just one.
Re: The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
#30This is my favorite tech article. It's satirical, it's witty, it's dense, and it's memorable. James Mickens truly outdid himself with this one - his other works are great, too, but this one is a cut above the rest!
I read another by him but didn’t realize that he has a series! These are great